The night sky above you could light up with one of the most spectacular sights of a generation.

Comet Ison in streaking towards us.

It should be visible in the next few days for much of December - it’s flaming tail, millions of miles long, appearing in the dawn sky.

Ison has come from the Oort cloud, a belt of comets on the very edge of the Solar System, where it has been for the last 4.6 billion years.

The comet is a ‘sungrazer’, passing so close to the Sun that it heats to over 2,760 degrees centigrade (5000 degrees farenheit).

It passes so close to the star -travelling at 234 miles a second - there is a risk the ball of dust and ice could break up.

Astronomers estimate Ison is just over a mile wide and are hoping Ison will develop a huge tail after its brush with the Sun.

Spectrometry will allow astro-chemists to analyse the chemical composition of the ices in Ison and from that data try to work out how the Solar System formed 4.6 billion years ago.

It would be the first time a comet has been seen in daylight in the UK since 1680, when sightings of an unknown object - which had a tail 90 million miles long - caused panic and fears it was a punishment from God.